Finale will ‘rock’ audience: actor
19-2’s Jared Keeso, creator of Letterkenny, says cop drama season will end with shocker
Jared Keeso says fans should brace themselves for the season finale of 19-2.
“We do have a wee bit of a cliffhanger,” he says. “I can tell you it’s going to be very 19-2.”
Keeso stars opposite Adrian Holmes as beat cops Nick Barron and Ben Chartier on the hour-long drama, the best dramatic series winner at the most recent Canadian Screen Awards. The finale airs Monday at 7 p.m. on Bravo.
The Montreal-based series has ended seasons on a shocker before. At the end of last season, the police squad was ripped apart after the revelation that one of its leaders was a pedophile and a mole.
Keeso says the season 3 finale will also “go to that place that’s really going to rock our audience and shock a lot of people.”
The police drama doesn’t just play these electric endings for gratuitous jolts, he says.
“Our writers do a really great job of laying the groundwork so that it all makes sense. You know that something crazy is coming.”
19-2 began as a French-language drama in Quebec. Before Bravo picked it up, the English version was originally pitched to — and turned down by — CBC.
“When CBC passed on 19-2, what a dagger,” says Keeso. “At the same time, my agent called. ‘But good news,’ she said. ‘I got an audition for you tomorrow. You will be playing a camp counsellor at a camp where there’s a possessed scarecrow on the loose.’ ”
Keeso did not see that as an apt followup to his breakout role playing Don Cherry in a two-part CBC bio-pic. He took what little money he had left — about $5,000 at the time — and put it into Letterkenny, an eccentric little comedy he created goofing on smalltown Ontario foibles.
“Best, most fortunate exercise of my life,” he says.
That money helped produce the original web version of the series. “I had to fund and cast that myself,” he says.
He didn’t have to look far for the other cast members. “We were playing spring beer league at the time,” says Keeso, who pulled Vancouver hockey pals Nathan Dales, Dylan Playfair and Andrew Herr into the act.
The web series became a TV series and is now the No. 1 original draw on Bell’s digital platform CraveTV.
A Canada Day weekend marathon of Letterkenny was also a hit on The Comedy Network. “A lot of people saw it for the first time,” says Keeso of the Comedy window.
A second season has been shot (and will première later this year), and a third goes into production this winter. The Letterkenny cast and crew have to shoot around 19-2, which goes back before the cameras for a fourth season next month.
Produced by New Metric Media, Letterkenny shoots in the northern Ontario city of Sudbury, not the easiest place to film in January and February. It works for Keeso, however.
“Growing up in Listowel, the snowmobile culture is massive,” he says.
He called up some of his old buddies in town just to get a refresher course on the local lingo. “Give me the snowmobile slag, the sled stories,” he asked.
Getting down just the right phrases is a key part of Letterkenny, says Keeso, who writes the series with fellow executive producer Jacob Tierney (The Trotsky).
“What we feel we excel at is laughs on a second-by-second basis,” says Keeso.
“So we’re writing for contagious dialogue, quotables.”
“Great day for hay” is a typical Letterkenny greeting.
Every day is a great day for Keeso lately, although he has no time anymore for one of his great passions — playing hockey. He’s a spare for a couple of Montreal teams while 19-2 is in production, “but I haven’t been able to get at it,” he says. “It’s killing me.”
When his Letterkenny co-star K. Trevor Wilson competed in the “Roast Battle” this summer at Montreal’s Just for Laughs, Keeso barely had time to wish him well.
He credits Wilson (who plays Squirrely Dan), along with Mark Forward as the trash-can-kicking hockey coach, as two who killed it on Letterkenny that first season.
The 32-year-old is so busy juggling shows he was literally writing scripts on a laptop sitting in the passenger seat while his girlfriend drove to New Brunswick and P.E.I. this summer. Keeso’s trusty dog was also part of the ride.
Born on July 1, Canada Day, Keeso is well aware he’s living the Canadian actor’s dream.
“Leaving St. John, NB,” he tweeted during the trip. “I’ve now had a Tim’s in every province in Canada. That is neat.”